


Pride's Paradox

by skyshores



Category: Mononoke-hime | Princess Mononoke
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-12
Updated: 2013-03-12
Packaged: 2017-12-05 02:27:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/717807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skyshores/pseuds/skyshores
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The huntress hesitates.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pride's Paradox

The fawn's fur was soft and dappled; a fine blanket it would make, had San caught it herself with the intention to skin.

She had not given chase to it, though; it had been waylaid by a human's trap, ensnared in a net like a butterfly caught, paralysed, on a cobweb. It seemed an invisible rope nearby had hoisted up the net and the young deer in it.

San's heart pounded and scorched, the heat brewed out of hunger and anger. She waited for the erratic beating to still before she pressed a hand against the limber neck behind the latticed rope. The fawn responded with a kick of its spindly legs.

"Where's your mother?" San whispered to it.

Bugling, it did not reply; it could not reply, and only looked up at her with large dumb eyes. San could not sense true fear in them. She searched past the moist black glaze of its pupils to find only a riot of bewilderment beneath, an admirable feat viable solely to a creature so innocent and unknowing.

Aeons ago, or what seemed like it, little San had believed all deer to speak in some secret, golden tongue, because she neither heard nor understood them; they were always silent in her presence, and so intimately of Shishigami's ilk that not even Moro had hunted those that grazed with him. It was not so now. The myth had been dispelled as soon as she'd watched Moro rip the chords from the throat of a stray hart for the first time, and San had never forgotten the shrill scream it'd made before it had lost the ability to make any noise at all.

The fawn's tongue lolled about in its mouth, now full of froth. Because of its age, it was still too small, too thin-limbed. San preferred not to hunt the young. She hated to hunger on their scarce meat, and more so to be reminded of all that could have entailed had Moro not taken pity upon her as an infant. Yet, she ate what was given to her, and learned to not dislike fawn-flesh. A delicious pride had superseded that initial, erroneous guilt, spurred by her brothers' opinion that the tender bones of a newborn fawn made the finest meal one might earn in all the forest. Mercy was not a virtue affixed to wolves. For San, it was an immense misgiving setting her further apart. So she ate until her brothers treated her as one of the pack, until she could tear for herself whole slabs of the stringy meat with her blunt teeth, without remorse.

Presently, a tiny proud piece inside her cried out for the fawn's flesh, and another for the appeasement of her hunter's decorum. It was not easy to scale the each of them up against the other.

Oh, for she hated human treachery far more than she loved her wolf's pride.

At the thought of them she remembered suddenly the smell of corroding iron, and the stink of gunpowder. To relieve herself of the memory of the scents (oh, how they pricked her side, like barbs), San spat into the ground and cursed the humans' iniquitous ways. She would not ever lower herself to their evils. No animal, deer or wolf, should ever be caged or netted or caught as if they weren't with spirits that wanted to run or fly or howl, with joy, with woe, with want. As if they had no right to be free. Noble Moro had always met her prey with honour, and had taught her daughter that if prey outran you, you were not worthy of it. It was with this that San knew the honour of a beast was greater than that of a human. A virtue it was, perhaps, honoured by gods.

So San pressed her knife to the neck of the fawn. She thought of killing it, thought of freeing it. Her heart had room enough for both charity and greed. A princess was to do her duty, yet was free to reap the harvests of her realm. San held her breath; she swam not in water, but air.

"Go home," she said, in the end, swallowing her bloodthirst, and then her pride. San withdrew her knife from its sheath, and strained it against the rope. "Return to your mother. She ought to be worried." It was thick and hard to cut. "I will come for you when you are grown." But she would cut it. "I will come when you can run."

Finally the rope broke with a dry snap, and the fawn dropped into San's arms. It struggled in her hands and hoofed into her stomach. San did not howl for help; she let the babe slip from her hands, easy, swift, and into the shadows engulfing the green wood beyond the mists.

San knew later that night Ashitaka would run his hand gingerly over the place it had kicked her, stroke the blue bruise with his bronze fingers, and ask in his tender way about whatever it was that had happened to her. San would show him both rows of her teeth and tell him of how, that morning, she had crossed paths with a fawn, freed it, and watched it ghost away; watched the wolf behind her breast leap out; to hunt it, to find the pride San had clawed past, the pride she had already reclaimed.

**Author's Note:**

> Still more Mononoke Hime fic to come! Wrote this as a smaller thing in the middle of a 9,600 word thing I'm still working on at the moment.


End file.
